Note from the editor of the CAMERA on Campus Blog: This article was written and published by Aaron Bandler, a reporter for the Jewish Journal (Los Angeles). CAMERA on Campus is proud to share their incredible work with our readers.
In what world are Al Jazeera, MSNBC and Mother Jones considered reliable sources but Fox News, The New York Post and Daily Mail are not? Answer: Wikipedia, where editors can only summarize what reliable sources say … or at least sources that Wikipedia editors have determined to be reliable.
Wikipedia is unequivocally the world’s go-to site for information. Not only is it often the first website to appear on a Google search, studies have shown that students begin the research process for their assignments by looking at Wikipedia and using the sources that the site provides. But what happens when the world’s go-to site for information uses biased sources under the guise of neutrality?
“There’s a fundamental problem with sourcing and what is considered a reliable source [on Wikipedia],” Wikipedia editor Jonathan Weiss (“JWeiss11” on Wikipedia), who has described himself as being “something of a centrist,” told me in August 2021. “Even if Wikipedia as itself is totally neutral, it can only reflect the reliable sources, and I think if you look at the landscape of news media and what’s coming out of academia — certainly the last 10 or 20 years — if you weigh everything that’s coming out equally, it’s going to be biased left.” But then Wikipedia’s “own bias” amplifies the bias in the media and academia, Weiss argued. “A lot of right-wing sites are basically inadmissible … whereas these Marxist opinion magazines are fine.”
How sources are viewed on Wikipedia ultimately comes down to what’s known as consensus; consensus is a combination of the number of editors who weigh in on a discussion and the strength of their arguments as it pertains to site policy. Usually, a supermajority of editors is needed for there to be consensus for a change per my editor sources. Oftentimes editors can collegially agree amongst themselves on what the consensus is, but there are instances where a closer (an uninvolved Wikipedian in good standing) is needed to render a verdict on the discussion based on the numbers and argument strength. In rare cases the minority view in a discussion can win if their argument is strong and the majority view’s is considered weak on policy grounds. The policy arguments can make this subjective; in regards to sources, Wikipedia’s reliable sources (RS) guideline states that the reliability of a source is based on if it’s “independent” and has “a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy.”
Additionally, Wikipedia’s verifiability policy states that article “content is determined by previously published information” by reliable sources “rather than editors’ beliefs, opinions, experiences, or previously unpublished ideas or information.” The site’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy also states that Wikipedia articles are supposed to “fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources.” In other words, reliable sources determine Wikipedia article content and how much prominence to give to each viewpoint; thus, what is considered a reliable source is crucial for Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia in a sense doesn’t trust us as editors and thus we make the assumption that the sources (both in terms of volume and quality) will help us decide what how much relative (or even any) emphasis we should give any aspect of any topic,” an editor told me. “That is a bad idea if you make two assumptions. First would be that the sources as a whole are neutral with respect to the subject and are truly proportional to the relative weight of various parts of the topic. I think it actually works well in cases where that holds true (say articles about sports teams). It fails when our sources themselves have an inherent bias and that bias is used to exclude one set of voices while embracing another.”
Indeed, a look at Wikipedia’s “Reliable Sources/Perennial Sources” (RSP) list of the most frequently discussed sources––which an editor told me “is treated like an official guideline”––shows that right-leaning sites like The Daily Mail, Breitbart News, The Epoch Times, The Daily Caller, and Newsmax are “deprecated,” meaning that they’re generally prohibited. The New York Post, The Daily Wire, The Federalist, The Washington Free Beacon and Quillette are among the sources that are in the “generally unreliable” category, meaning that it “should normally not be used” on Wikipedia. Fox News is considered generally unreliable for reporting on politics from Nov. 2020 onward, a decision that occurred following their settlement with Dominion (prior to this, Fox News’s talk shows were already considered generally unreliable).
The best way to understand the difference between “generally unreliable” and “deprecated” is through the lens of what an editor told me: “Generally unreliable sources might still be used for really basic factual claims or possibly quotes. Deprecated sources are presumed to just flat make stuff up. So an unreliable source might feature a climate change denier to talk about why the new climate change bill is a bad idea. The idea being they are interviewing someone who is wrong so we don’t listen to them. A deprecated source might just invent the quotes or even the scientist … However, in practice it seems like people suggest deprecation just because they don’t like the source. They rarely point to any examples of fabrication etc. Personally I’m opposed to it in general since I think it seems to be used indiscriminately.” The editor also told me: “I think it was a bad thing for Wikipedia that they started this [RSP] list as it shifts away from asking ‘is this article reliable for this claim’ to ‘can we get this entire source thrown out because we don’t like it?’”
To be fair, there are certainly some right-leaning outlets that are usable on Wikipedia; The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph and the since-shuttered The Weekly Standard are considered “generally reliable.” National Review, The Washington Examiner and Washington Times are considered “marginally reliable.” But, as Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger has noted in a 2021 blog post excoriating his former website as being “more one-sided than ever,” outlets like The Weekly Standard and Wall Street Journal are “often centrist as conservative, and they are generally careful never to leave the current Overton Window of progressive thought. They are the ‘loyal opposition’ of the progressive media hegemony.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian and CNN are all considered “generally reliable” on Wikipedia’s RSP list. This alone creates a left-leaning bias on Wikipedia, but what makes it even worse is that far-left sources — MSNBC, Al Jazeera, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Intercept and Jacobin — as well as partisan sources like Vox are also rated as “generally reliable” on Wikipedia. The Huffington Post’s politics section (excluding politics, Huffington Post is generally reliable but their contributors are considered generally unreliable), Salon and the left-leaning Media Matters for America are considered “marginally reliable” (meaning they can be used in certain context-dependent situations). Further, Huffington Post and Salon each have 27,393 and 8,933 pages of citations on Wikipedia, respectively; those numbers for National Review and Washington Examiner are 3,404 and 2,672, respectively.
What makes [Wikipedia’s bias] even worse is that far-left sources — MSNBC, Al Jazeera, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Intercept and Jacobin — as well as partisan sources like Vox are rated as “generally reliable” on Wikipedia.
One way editors are able to get away with this ideological disparity in sources: How other reliable sources view a source is a determining factor of its reliability. “How accepted and high-quality reliable sources use a given source provides evidence, positive or negative, for its reliability and reputation,” Wikipedia’s RS guideline states. “The more widespread and consistent this use is, the stronger the evidence. For example, widespread citation without comment for facts is evidence of a source’s reputation and reliability for similar facts, whereas widespread doubts about reliability weigh against it.” Further, Wikipedia’s RS guideline actually states that “reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective. Sometimes non-neutral sources are the best possible sources for supporting information about the different viewpoints held on a subject.” Past discussions on these sources show editors acknowledging such leftist sources are biased, but argue that they are not known for promoting misinformation and that such sources are held in high regard by other reliable sources––meaning that editors seem to be fine with biased sources only when it serves their narrative.
“Many of the sources on the right are ruled as unusable based on a few common grounds. 1: They will say something about climate that can be called denialism and thus they are viewed as inaccurate,” an editor told me. “2. Basically the same as #1 but about the 2020 elections. Often the detail of the claim isn’t clearly false or is about a detail that may have merit. However, since the mainstream sources have said there were no issues with 2020 anyone who raises any issues is viewed as ‘election denier.’ 3. Same as 1 and 2 but about COVID. It also hurts that often mainstream media/left wing sources won’t get facts from the right … but they are happy to ask far left sources for an opinion or credit their work. Thus a source on the right has trouble establishing credibility and we treat the Southern Poverty Law Center as more reliable than [the libertarian think-tank] Cato [Institute] despite the clear bias and issues with the SPLC. Over time this certainly makes it harder to use sources on the right.” The SPLC is considered generally reliable while Cato has a marginally reliable rating.
The editor also explained to me that part of the reason for this is that the media puts Fox and other conservative sources “under a microscope,” thus making it “easy for editors to cite ‘Fox was wrong’ examples but harder to do the same for left-leaning sites.” The result is that “we have clearly left-leaning sources that are seen as reliable providing their view, but we don’t have a counterbalancing view … because we don’t have the right leaning sources to provide their case.” Since editors are only allowed to pick from mostly left-wing sources, it becomes difficult to counter the insertion of “subjective claims” into a Wikipedia page such as calling an action “racist/sexist/phobist etc” when “sources on the left are likely to say it is while sources on the right are likely to say it isn’t,” an editor told me.
Legacy media outlets have promulgated false stories, but Wikipedia editors tend to handwave such errors away. For instance, some editors argued in a 2021 discussion that The Washington Post should be downgraded to marginally reliable since the outlet has published stories they had to correct, such as the story that claimed Covington Catholic High School kids mocked a Native American man at the 2019 March for Life rally and resulted in a defamation lawsuit against the paper, ended with an out-of-court settlement. Other examples of misreported stories in The Washington Post cited in the discussion was the story that Russia was providing bounties to Taliban members to kill American soldiers and that Trump said “find the fraud” in Georgia in the 2020 election. But the consensus of editors argued that the Post should still be generally reliable because reliable sources “can make mistakes and correct them when they occur” and that the Post’s errors aren’t as frequent as Fox News’s errors.
“Fox really stepped in it with the Dominion thing,” an editor told me. “But I do feel that The Washington Post is guided by politics rather than factual reporting too much of the time… or at least too much of the time when editors want to use it as a source for political related articles on Wikipedia. For this reason, I would downplay its characterizations and the amount of weight it gives topics when used on Wikipedia in political areas. However, too many editors like the bias so I don’t see it changing.”
A similar dynamic is at play regarding sources in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict topic area, particularly when it comes to NGOs. I have previously written about how Amnesty International and B’Tselem are viewed as reliable on Wikipedia but the Anti-Defamation League is now considered generally unreliable on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. NGO Monitor is considered generally unreliable after enough editors claimed that the pro-Israel watchdog has an extreme right-wing bias, close ties to the Israeli government and published misinformation, including running afoul of Israel’s libel laws in 2007. But Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, which is not on the RSP list, can be seen scattered in various articles; according to NGO Monitor, Euro-Med Monitor’s “current and former Board Chairs appear on a 2013 list, published by Israel, of Hamas’ ‘main operatives and institutions’ in Europe.” The ADL noted that in Nov. 2023, “Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor expressed ‘concerns’ that Israeli soldiers were harvesting organs of Palestinians killed in Gaza,” which the ADL says is a play “on the blood libel trope.” Further, Euro-Med Monitor founder and chairman Ramy Abdu “justified and ecstatically celebrated the [Oct. 7] Hamas massacre on Twitter,” according to UN Watch. But that doesn’t seem to matter to Wikipedia editors, who believe that such arguments are not evidence of it being unreliable and that it should still be considered usable with attribution because, among other things, the United Nations purportedly holds Euro-Med Monitor in good standing. Similarly, Middle East Monitor (MEMO), a London-based press watchdog and lobbying organization that is reportedly financed by Qatar, has tons of citations in Wikipedia articles and its use has been defended by editors despite it publishing pro-Hamas opinion pieces and being accused by the UK antisemitism watchdog Community Security Trust of promulgating antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Jewish Virtual Library (JVL), which The Algemeiner described in 2013 as being the “the most comprehensive online Jewish encyclopedia in the world,” was designated as generally unreliable in 2020 was mainly due to editors arguing that some of its material directly cites Wikipedia and that it’s basically “a glorified blog” for respected Middle East analyst Mitchell Bard. Blogs are only usable on Wikipedia if the author is an expert in the relevant field. An editor explained to me that the consensus on Wikipedia is that JVL “can be used for the purpose of self-published expert, but that JVL itself hasn’t established itself as an outlet with a reputation for accuracy and fact-checking. I’m not sure how it would do so now that it’s generally unreliable. It would probably need to either have other RS saying it is, or improve their methodology and editorial standards pages on their site to get editors to change their minds.”
CAMERA will more likely than not be dismissed as an unreliable partisan source if it’s brought up in a discussion.
On the other hand, Mondoweiss is considered marginally reliable even though journalist John Ware noted in a recent Fathom Journal article that Mondoweiss “marked 7 October as a day to ‘celebrate’ and that ‘we must raise the banner of ‘searing bullets and blood-stained knives’” and is part of the “alternative media outlets who are now in the forefront of challenging Israel’s claims that there was widespread sexual violence.” Ware thoroughly debunks each instance of Mondoweiss’ reporting on the matter. “This type of debunking is how it’s supposed to work,” an editor told me. “A detailed list and set of arguments showing impartial fact-checkers casting doubt or debunking.”
Though Ware’s article has not been discussed amongst editors regarding Mondoweiss’s reliability, it seems unlikely that Mondoweiss will be downgraded anytime soon. Because the anti-Israel editors have the numbers, they have consistentlyfended off past efforts to downgrade Mondoweiss and claim there’s consensus for its “marginally reliable” rating.
“One of the most frustrating things about this stuff is that I always tried to be intellectually honest about sources and supported removing many ostensibly pro-Israel sources if they didn’t seem to meet the bar I assumed Wikipedia required, while most of these guys give a pass to absolute crap like Mondoweiss or Max Blumenthal,” said one editor with thousands of edits who grew disillusioned with Wikipedia. Blumenthal’s “The Grayzone” was deprecated in 2020, which another editor told me means that Blumenthal himself is de-facto deprecated. New College of Florida English Professor David Mikics wrote in a 2015 Tablet piece that Blumenthal, the son of longtime Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal, is an “anti-Zionist polemic dripping with cartoon-like, racially weighted depictions of Israeli Jews” whose work has been endorsed by antisemite David Duke. Additionally, biology researcher Dr. Michal Perach wrote in a Nov. 2023 Haaretz op-ed that Blumenthal has whitewashed Hamas’ atrocities on Oct. 7 and denied war crimes committed by Russia, China and Syria.
But perhaps the most problematic source on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Al Jazeera. Journalist Douglas Murray has noted in a New York Post op-ed that Al Jazeera is “founded, funded and directed by the terrorist-supporting state of Qatar” and that “a number of Al Jazeera journalists reporting on Israel’s war against terrorists in Gaza were — er —terrorists” with alleged ties to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, though Al Jazeera denies these allegations. And yet there are more than 5,000 pages worth of citations to the Qatari-funded news outlet on Wikipedia and there are countless instances in which Al Jazeera is cited for facts (also known as wikivoice). “It’s quite widely cited for all sorts of topics,” an editor told me. I have heard varying opinions from my editor sources as to what Al Jazeera’s reliability should be, but what is clear from my sources is that Al Jazeera’s “generally reliable” rating is too generous. “I haven’t seen Al Jazeera make retractions; it needs to actually acknowledge it and not issue a stealth retraction,” an editor said. “Other Middle East state-funded sources like [the Hezbollah-affiliated] Al Mayadeen or some of the Russian ones were easily deprecated.” This editor believes that Al Jazeera should at least be downgraded to the “marginally reliable” rating.
Al Jazeera had quietly taken down a video in March about a woman in Gaza who alleged that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians at Al Shifa Hospital; the story was proven to be false. But when this stealth retraction was pointed out in a Wikipedia discussion, editors dismissed and handwaved away the critique by arguing, among other things, that Al Jazeera had correctly reported that someone had made the allegation. Never mind the fact that no reputable news outlet would run a serious allegation like that without some sort of corroboration. Editors have defended Al Jazeera in various discussionsby claiming that that the Qatari-funded network’s occasional mistakes doesn’t mean the outlet is unreliable overall and that other reliable sources frequently cite it.
But Wikipedia articles aren’t even safe from anti-Israel sources that are considered unreliable, as one editor told me that anti-Israel editors have a bad habit of “sneaking in sources” like the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency, which is considered generally unreliable for controversial topics and international politics. For example, as I have previously reported, there are multiple citations to Anadolu Agency in the Wikipedia “Gaza genocide” article.
Additionally, an editor pointed out to me that there have been efforts of late to downgrade Jewish sources, as in May there was an attempt to downgrade the Jewish Chronicle, though for now it has survived with its status quo rating of generally reliable but no consensus that on if it’s “reliable for topics related to the British Left, Muslims, Islam, and Palestine/Palestinians,” per the RSP list. A discussion regarding AlHaTorah.org, a Torah library website, was recently started in an attempt to cast doubt on its reliability, though that discussion appears to have stalled out.
And of course, the mainstream media and the previously mentioned far-left sources are all biased against Israel, whereas various right-leaning sources provide more balanced coverage on Israel.
“In the wake of Oct. 7, ‘generally reliable’ sources have trafficked in disinformation, as when The New York Times splashed the Al-Ahli hospital bombing hoax over its front page, helping spark violent anti-Jewish riots across the world; or when The New Yorker legitimized Holocaust inversion — a long-running staple of anti-Zionist propaganda originating in the 1960s USSR,” scholar Izabella Tabarovsky wrote in Tablet. “Conservative outlets, on the other hand, have produced reporting that tells Israel’s side of the story and have looked far more critically at the anti-Israel campus protests. The ‘generally unreliable’ Washington Free Beacon has arguably produced the most extensive reporting on the protests. Wikipedia editors, however, are warned against using the Beacon as a source, which is why of the 353 references accompanying Wikipedia’s article on the pro-Palestinian campus protests, the overwhelming majority is to liberal and far-left sources plus Al Jazeera.” Further buttressing her point is that, as Murray pointed out, The Washington Post’s “foreign desk alone includes six journalists who previously worked for Al Jazeera. When people wonder how the media go awry, this is a textbook ‘how.’” The same applies to Wikipedia as well.
One editor told me they’re optimistic that “over time pro-Hamas sources will be downgraded … Unfortunately I think all the scare tactics and firing squad tactics have made pro-Israel editors afraid to opine.”
As long as this ideological disparity exists in what is considered a reliable source on Wikipedia, the world’s go-to site for information will continue to be biased and one-sided on contentious political topics.
